


The shadow of a grudge

by MidLifeLez



Category: Holby City
Genre: Because of Reasons, Crime writers AU, F/F, They write crime fiction, Yeah you read that right
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2018-02-02
Updated: 2018-04-24
Packaged: 2019-03-12 19:08:34
Rating: Not Rated
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 9
Words: 12,739
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/13553727
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/MidLifeLez/pseuds/MidLifeLez
Summary: Serena Campbell and Bernie Wolfe are two of the UK's preeminent crime fiction writers. And they have history.





	1. A good meal

A group of people were unhelpfully gathered in front of the seating plan and Serena was too tired to ask them to move; instead she went straight inside the marquee and wandered around the tables, looking for her name. She found it on Table 3: close enough to the bar and the stage to feel appropriately well thought of, but not central enough to be in people’s line of sight all evening. _Good_ , she thought, the weekend having sapped the life out of her. In the best of possible ways, she would concede: the annual Holby Literary Festival was always a good chance to share her latest work, flog a few of the older titles that bookshops rarely stocked in any great quantity, chat to fans, and it was close to home as well – no need to find a room at a B&B, no lengthy train journeys. But just now she wasn’t convinced she could plaster on a smile for the duration of the closing dinner.

Especially once she spotted the name card placed to the right of her own.

“Ah, Serena, there you are.” Juliette, one of the organisers whom Serena knew best, appeared at her elbow. “It won’t be long before we sit down, do you want” – she broke off, following Serena’s unhappy gaze to the table settings. “Oh gosh, I’m sorry,” she said, pressing her hands to her cheeks. “Emily” – at this Juliette gestured towards one of the seemingly endless supply of 20-somethings who had made everything happen over the course of the past few days – “suggested we arrange things by genre this year, and everyone from Crime Fiction fitted nicely around one table. I didn’t realise she had sat you next to one another.” Serena grimaced and glanced around them, wanting to make sure that no one overheard the conversation. Juliette did the same before picking up the offending card and moving around to the other side of the table. She surveyed the places now in front of her. “Malcolm?”

Serena nodded and watched Juliette make the swap. Malcolm Lynch was 70 if he was a day and peddled passable rural plod stories; he had a spectacular comb-over and one of those mouths that couldn’t help but hang open slightly, as if his bottom lip was always in flight from his teeth. Get too close and he would spit sibilants as well as scraps of his main course at you. But Serena knew from experience that he was generally more focused on the food than on his companions, and would be away to the bar the moment his plate was empty. _Preferable, on balance._ “Thanks Ju,” she said, patting Juliette on the arm and dropping her bags next to her seat. “Shame to ruin a perfectly good meal.” 

Had she foreseen the singular auditory experience that came with giving Malcolm Lynch a bowl of lobster bisque, Serena might not have been so grateful. It was as if someone had stuck a vacuum cleaner hose into a deep puddle. But it was over soon enough, and she had a young French woman to her left who wrote dark novels set in eerily small villages and ran a line in deliciously gothic, if scarcely believable, anecdotes. It turned out to be surprisingly easy to tune out the slurping and gargling over her other shoulder. Only once during the meal did a bark of laughter from across the table attract her attention, her head jerking up to allow her to eye the source before she had chance to damp the reflex.

If Berenice Wolfe was aware of the several pairs of eyes on her in that moment, she gave no sign of it; her hand raised to her mouth as if it might contain any further guffaws, she looked only at the man to her left, whom Serena vaguely recognised as the author of the Lieutenant Jack Milton series. Berenice’s cheeks were flushed pink and shone under the lights, and her fringe hung low over her eyes. When eventually she cast a glance around the table, she caught Serena looking and threw her a half-smile, raising her head just a fraction in acknowledgement, and went back to her conversation. Of course she knew who Serena was, but they were acquaintances, nothing more; Berenice Wolfe was entirely indifferent to Serena Campbell’s existence. And Serena hated her for it. 

She had no right to be so infuriatingly disinterested in Serena; no right to be so casual, so insouciant. They had beef, damn it! Not that anyone would ever know it from Berenice’s demeanour. It had been eight years, almost nine, in fact, and in all that time Berenice Wolfe had never once acknowledged the matter. “Just ‘Bernie’ is fine,” she would say with a smile and a shrug every time Serena called her Berenice, as if it had never happened before – as if it was only that Serena didn’t know that she went by ‘Bernie’ and not that Serena took great pains to chisel each syllable of her full name out of ice.

Just the sight of the woman was enough to set Serena’s pulse thumping angrily at her wrist, to put colour in her cheeks so that she couldn’t even feign nonchalance. The original offence barely mattered now - much as it might pain her to admit it, Serena knew that Berenice Wolfe had earned her place at the table, at all the festivals and panels and talk shows at which they found themselves thrown not-quite-together. No, what mattered was the pretence that it had never happened at all; everyone, even the people who had known Serena the longest, seemed to have decided to follow Berenice Wolfe’s lead, leaving Serena looking churlish and petty. The pride with which she usually carried life-long, take-it-to-the-grave grudges refused to blossom here, and instead she felt like a fool. Bernie Wolfe had simply willed the whole thing out of existence. How dare she? How _bloody_ dare she?

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> This idea has been floating around my head for a while and insomnia produced this opening. Worth continuing?


	2. The horse's mouth

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Thank you so much for all your lovely comments and words of encouragement after the first chapter. I hope this next bit lives up to your expectations - this story is going to unfurl quite gradually, but I've plotted it in fairly short chapters, so hopefully there won't be too long between each being posted.

The first two books in the _In Cold Blood_ series had enjoyed modest success: they were marketed well enough to earn reviews in a couple of Sunday supplements, and sold well enough to earn Bernie Wolfe a contract to deliver two more. She had agreed for want of any better alternative – she had no particular literary ambitions, but she liked writing cases for DCI Eve Granger. It kept her connected to her former life, her old independent self, even if she did need help heaving around some of her old box files.

“You’re lucky to be alive, Bern,” Marcus would say whenever her frustrations got the better of her, gently laying fingertips to the scar that sat pink and angry at the base of her neck and drawing her close. “You’re allowed to take things easy.”

At this Bernie would close her eyes and take a deep breath, and Marcus would think he’d stolen inside the wall that his wife had built up around herself since the accident, when really all he ever did was run headlong into it, like some particularly dim-witted livestock.

There was a time when their relationship hadn’t felt like hard work – when it had been the opposite, in fact, and marrying Marcus had been the least complicated thing to do. Now, though, he was behaving as if her entirely predictable reaction to being injured, to being stood down, was beyond his ken. She didn’t care what she was or was not allowed to do; she didn’t want to ‘take things easy’. All of this, being stuck at home all day, shuffling about in slippers, propping herself up on umpteen cushions, was precisely her idea of hell.   

Bernie knew she should be glad of what good fortune she had been granted: the odds of taking a bullet to the shoulder and surviving the ricochet – they had eventually found the bullet in her stomach – were fairly long. But it didn’t feel like a win. She had enjoyed only three weeks as the youngest female DCI to serve on the Avon and Somerset Police force before getting shot, and it had only taken another three weeks for them to decide she wouldn’t recover sufficiently to return to active duty.

The prospect – though she scoffed to call it that – of a desk job had kept her in a funk, silent and brooding and flinching from anyone’s touch, for weeks more. She went to rehab every day, worked her body until she was sweating and gasping for breath, until she no longer had the strength to bat away her physio’s attempts to steer her into a seat, but, though she was soon able to lengthen her strides and to stand up a little straighter, no amount of bad tempered stretching would restore full rotation to her neck and shoulder. She stood in front of the wall of mirrors and scowled to watch the halting movements of her broken body.

The air at home had been stifling, dense with the unspoken sadness of a woman who felt she had lost everything and a family, a husband, children, who saw themselves as nothing in her eyes. Bernie wanted it to be an arch comment from Cameron, a gesture from Charlotte (who would leave gifts for her mother to be found during the days alone: wild flowers, chocolate, pencil drawings), that brought her around. She wished it could have been the kindness in Marcus’s eyes, his desperation, almost tangible, for her to think theirs a life worth having.

But it was, she knew, perhaps they all knew, work that saved her. She had been reading through an old case, one of her first big arrests, torturing herself with this milestone in a career cut short, when Cam came home from school. “I didn’t know it at the time, but I was pregnant with you when we closed this case,” Bernie said, turning eyes that glistened with unshed tears on her son, who stood on tip-toes in the doorway. She had never really discussed cases with him before. By the time Marcus and Charlotte got home via Charlotte’s piano lesson, Bernie’s voice - loud and expressive and marked indelibly by a smile – carried through the house, narrating the case to a rapt Cameron.

Eve Granger: razor-sharp detective, battling single mother (“I’ll try not to take it personally, Bern”), scourge of Holby’s criminal underbelly, was born.

 

It was the third book in the series that changed things. _In Cold Blood: A Waiting Game_ was published at just the same moment as a chance DNA match caught a killer who had escaped justice for the past 27 years. It was a better book than the previous two, Bernie thought; she felt more confident as an author, and Eve was growing, developing, becoming more real, but it was this, this pure coincidence, that made the difference. She found herself fielding interview requests, being asked for comments on the case as it unfolded at the Old Bailey, being invited to read extracts of her work at book stores and sign copies for readers. They called them fans. She had fans, now.

BBC Radio Holby was housed in a new building on the outskirts of town. Bernie looked up at the windows, covered in the station’s logo, from the car and bit her lip. It was more nerve-wracking, somehow, to do this so close to home. The staff ushered her in, offered tea and coffee, biscuits, explained the order of the show; soon enough she was sat across the mixing desk from the host of the after-lunch slot, headphones on, her breath sounding loudly in her ears. She talked about her career, gave an edited account of her injuries, relayed the beginnings of her fictional DCI.

“Of course Holby already has a renowned crime fiction writer in Serena Campbell,” the host said, smiling across the table.

“Oh, yes,” Bernie replied, hesitantly. “I’ve got some of her most recent books – the one on the train?” Bernie pressed clammy palms into the tops of her thighs and hoped for the best.

“It’s great, isn’t it?” the host, Claire something, asked, not giving a relieved Bernie time to answer, not really wanting an answer. “There’s been some suggestion, and I don’t know what you think to this, but there’s been some suggestion that _A Waiting Game_ is pretty similar to a story of Serena’s from about 12 years ago, a short work that she wrote before the Nancy Bolton trilogy?”

Bernie cleared her throat. “Oh, gosh!” she exclaimed. “I’m afraid I haven’t read anything that far back, so I’ve no idea!” 

The host threw her a thumbs up and started to bring up the jingle that would close this segment. “Well, there you go folks, straight from the horse’s mouth! _In Cold Blood: A Waiting Game_ is out now, and Berenice _and_ Serena will be at Holby’s famous literary festival at Wyvern Fields next month. Check out our website for details and to book your tickets.”

A few miles away, Serena stabbed a finger at the radio’s off switch. Her nephew, Jason, appeared, looking for something to eat, stopping when he saw the look on his aunt’s face. He canted his head to the side, considering her. “Why are you frowning?”


	3. Walking off the shelves

So that was that. A weak, throwaway question and it was never mentioned again. A state of affairs that Serena could almost have lived with; it wasn’t like the story in question was one of her best, and she knew the field, knew there were only so many crimes, only so many scenarios and ways of surprising readers. She probably had half a dozen people on her Christmas card list who could be accused of plot recycling – and who wouldn’t deny it, wouldn’t miss a beat before saying “Yes? And?” At her very first authors’ Q&A another member of the panel had looked at her glumly over his coffee, apparently pained by Serena’s enthusiasm. “We’re all just giving people something to do while they wait for the day to be over,” he’d said, not waiting for a reply before turning and cracking open the fire escape, lighting a cigarette. She didn’t think she would ever feel quite like that, but over time the suggestion had become less horrifying.

Yes, Serena could almost have lived with it. But there was a nervousness so audible in Berenice’s voice as she responded to the question, feebly put as it was, that it nagged at Serena for days and weeks afterwards. “Didn’t you think she sounded a bit… anxious?” she would ask people – friends, family; “oh darling,” they would say in response, squeezing her shoulder or patting her gently, as if handling not just her arm but her ego. She felt so roundly patronised that eventually she too stopped talking about it, though the memory of it had never quite let her be. There was something there, she was sure of it.

They moved in the same circles, now, attended the same festivals and dinners, worked the same circuit of signings and chapter readings, and Serena could swear there was a haunted look in Ms Wolfe’s eyes whenever they fleetingly met her own. But then someone would ask a question or set a steaming cup of tea in front of Berenice, and with a turn of the head and a swish of blonde hair she was transformed, and watching from across the room Serena could almost understand how no one else ever spotted it. Almost, _almost_ – that was the word that captured so much of her relationship with Berenice. They boarded the same trains bound for the same destinations and _almost_ greeted one another; sat on the same panels and _almost_ spoke about one another’s work; Serena could _almost_ bear it.  

Serena did not struggle with ill feeling – she carried it with the same warmth and fervour with which she felt anything. Decades ago the reviewer from the _Holby Gazette_ had described the setting of Serena’s first book as having “all the depth and detail of a toy theatre” (the cutting was pinned above her desk even now, yellowed and leathery) and to this day she delighted in torturing him with feigned pleasantries while declining his increasingly desperate interview requests. They, though, had ‘had it out’: a fierce exchange in an echoing corridor. That pompous old windbag knew exactly what she thought of him and his two-bit review, as did anyone else in the vicinity. There had been no such satisfying tête-à-tête with Berenice bloody Wolfe.

She had tried, at least to begin with, to engineer it. That first Holby Literary Festival, when the wound was still fresh.

“Ah, Berenice,” Serena had said, smiling as widely as she dared, holding out her hand. “Nice to finally meet you.”

“Oh, um, just, it’s just Bernie,” had been the reply. “Wonderful to meet you.” Bernie emphasised the final word, seemingly cognizant of their relative status in the world of crime fiction.

“So,” Serena had said, stretching out the vowel long enough to draw the gaze of ‘just Bernie’ away from the floor. “I hear _A Waiting Game_ is walking off the shelves; you must be delighted.”

Serena expected some kind of affirmative, would let Berenice have that before she mentioned her own story of delayed justice – ‘ _a similar case, actually; quite similar…’_ For a second something had flashed across Bernie’s face and Serena had thought she might not have to say anything more at all, had thought that Bernie might just open up and spill out a confession right away. And then Bernie had frowned and nodded at the cane in her left hand. The cane that Serena hadn’t spotted, and that Bernie was evidently leaning rather heavily on.

“Doing better than me, then,” Bernie had said, with a huff and a self-deprecating smile.

The flicker of triumph in Serena’s chest puttered out like a candle under a snuffer. “I’m sorry, I didn’t mean to be…” Bernie had cut her off with a wave of her right hand and a shake of her head.

“It’s fine,” she had said, “I wasn’t trying to tell you off. I don’t often need it these days but I’ve been on my feet a lot since I arrived and apparently that still renders me next to useless.”

Serena had felt the frustration in Bernie as if it was her own teeth that were on edge with it. She offered to get Bernie a drink, to try and find her a seat, but had been politely declined, and had taken the first opportunity to move on. “I must find Juliette…” she had said, gesturing vaguely towards the outside of the tent. The confession would have to wait.

And wait.

And wait. 

There was rarely a good time to bring it up (a job that was all Serena’s; Bernie clearly wasn’t going to go near the topic), and once the next volume of _In Cold Blood_ was out, and the next – Berenice Wolfe read for long hours and wrote for even longer, making her a prolific publisher – it only became more difficult. But that flash in Bernie’s eyes on their first meeting had only redoubled Serena’s certainty that the confession was due. At the following year’s festival the cane was nowhere to be seen, and for a while Serena had entertained the notion that Berenice had made the most of her immobility to swerve the conversation off-course; though she decided not, her opinion of the woman didn’t soften.

Bernie, though, was popular, was as patient with fans as she was impatient with her publishers, and Eve Granger flourished with her. There was even talk of a television series.  The circle of people with whom Serena could share her opinion of Berenice Wolfe shrank, the circle of those who knew why she felt that way even smaller. And so the _almost_ set in. Set in and lingered like a long and deathly winter. Eight years and counting - Serena knew the exact date at which the counter ticked over onto nine.

What she didn't know, just yet, was that it never would. 

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Sorry I haven't updated this for ages, unfortunately life got in the way and I was feeling a bit glum about this story. I hope some of you will stick with me.


	4. Caller unknown

“Are you for real?” Bernie stopped dead and held the phone out in front of her. Caller unknown. She’d answered in a hurry, not really paying attention, thinking that it would be Marcus, or one of the kids asking for money. The trolley she had been pushing continued to meander across the car park; from behind her came the beep of a horn and she dashed after her shopping, reaching out with her free hand and returning the phone to her ear with the other.

“I don’t know where you’re getting this,” she said, willing her voice to sound stronger than she felt, hoping the tone of derision might sow seeds of doubt even as she turned left and right, a frantic search of nearby faces. She felt exposed. _Still, better here than at home._ Bernie blanched at the thought.

“Are you saying it’s not true?” The voice in her ear was calm, disinterested. _He’s at work,_ Bernie thought. _He’s just sat at a desk, casually threatening to tear my life apart._ She struggled to remember the name he had given her at the start of the phone call, back when she half-suspected this was going to be about PPI. Now she couldn’t help but picture him surrounded by piles of old newspapers, ratty old notebooks, and mugs of greening coffee dregs, just another day on the job.

“Ms Wolfe?” The sound of her name made Bernie jump. She had no hope of claiming the initiative here. What could she say? _‘Yes, it’s true, I cheated on my husband with Alex Dawson. The man who put up with me through months and years of recovery, the father of my children, yes, him; I spent years creeping around behind his back, getting my kicks with a younger woman.’_ That was how they’d tell the story, she realised, closing her eyes to dam the tears. It wasn’t like that, that’s not what it was – _Christ, listen to yourself_ , she thought; _such a cliché_ – but that’s what it would be in print. That’s what people would read. She saw her sister-in-law shaking open the newspaper at breakfast, saw the conversations that would go quiet the moment Marcus walked into the staff room.

Bernie cleared her throat.

“I’m not going to dignify that with an answer,” she said, though she’d never heard the phrase used convincingly, and it sounded even worse from her own lips. Of the ways that she had imagined this coming to light, and there had been a few, but only a few, this was never one of them. She had never planned for getting this sort of call on a Tuesday afternoon in the Sainsbury’s car park, and now had nothing better than pat responses like this. She was hardly surprised when she heard a chuckle on the other end of the line.

“So, just to clarify,” the man said, “you are not denying the affair?” He left the briefest of pauses. “With a female officer. A lower-ranking female officer.”

Alex. Bernie felt her vision go in and out of focus. This hack didn’t just have a gun to her own head, but Alex’s too. Alex, who had hated all the skulking about but who had done it because she loved Bernie and because she had been optimistic enough to hope for a future together; Alex who had held her during her darkest moments, whispered words of affection and reassurance; Alex who had bitten her lip and let Bernie cry even as Bernie ended things: this was going to be her reward. Bernie almost lost her footing as she staggered under the weight of all the hurt she was about to cause.

“I’m neither confirming nor denying it,” she finally replied. _Maybe he’s bluffing_ , she thought. _How could he actually know?_ She was sure Alex wouldn’t have betrayed their secrets. “I’m not engaging with this stupid nonsense. You haven’t got a story.”

“So if I was to mention a pub - lovely little place, just outside Bath it is, now what was it called again…” Bernie moved the phone away from her face to try to keep him from hearing her gasp. How many times had she sat in interview rooms shuffling papers around pretending to try and recall the final detail that would implicate the person across the table from her? And now here she was, sweating, hoping against hope that the next words out of his mouth wouldn’t be –

“The Wheelwrights Arms, that’s it.” Bernie leaned on her car. “Better than just pub grub, that. And a double room at less than £100 for the night, you can’t say fairer than that, can you, Ms Wolfe?”

She wanted to vomit. She wanted to beg, to plead. It sounded so cheap and dirty like this. And why? For what?

“Is this what passes for the public interest these days, then?” she hissed down the phone, her head bent low so as to keep her out of anyone’s eye line.

He laughed again, in a way that made her feel stupid and small and completely powerless. “Not a big part of the job description these days, I’m afraid,” he replied.    

“This what you dreamed of doing when you were younger, was it?” Bernie had never been one to lash out, but she was desperate now; she barely let him finish speaking before she renewed the attack, weak as it was. She knew the call was nearly over and at the end of it she would have to figure out which fire to attend first. “Writing your name into journalism history with a few hundred words destroying my marriage? Hardly the Pentagon Papers, is it?”

There was a pause. Bernie looked at the sky, as close to praying as she was ever likely to get.

“We’ve all got bills to pay, Ms Wolfe. Maybe your publisher would like to give me a six-figure deal to re-hash my failed journalism career in a series of books?”

Bernie winced.

“When are you going to print this” – she almost choked on the word – “story?” she asked. What day was it? Tuesday? Tuesday. The _Holby Gazette_ came out every Thursday, so she would have at least 24 hours to tell the people who needed to be told, perhaps even an extra week.

“It’ll be up on our website later this afternoon.”

The website. She hadn’t even thought about the website. Bernie tried to picture their calendar in her mind, tried to focus on what Marcus’s schedule looked like today. She knew she couldn’t expect him home until at least half past six, but maybe she could go – no, it was no good, he had a full afternoon in theatre, and it would only be worse to do this on hospital grounds, the car, however far she got before crumpling.

“Unless you want to give us your side of things? I’ve got a reporter not far from your house if you…”

She didn’t hear the rest of the sentence. Feeling her temperature rising with the panic, she threw her phone into the boot with a clatter alongside the groceries and climbed into the driver’s seat, laying her forehead against the steering wheel. She needed to get somewhere away from people, away from enquiring eyes, but home, apparently, was off limits. There was only one other place she could think of. She raised her head, sniffed loudly, and turned the key in the ignition.  

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> I'm sorry this is super slow burn, I hate myself, etc. etc.


	5. The enemy of my enemy

Serena held her card over the reader and slipped through the turnstile, humming just quietly enough to avoid being shushed. From the outside, Holby City Library was nothing special: a squat redbrick building with big square windows, set back just far enough from the road to mute the sound of traffic. Not much from the inside, either: sun-bleached carpets and mismatched chairs scattered amongst brown metal shelves that squeaked and creaked. It was still here though, a survivor of cut after cut; still a portal to other worlds and shining futures and smoggy pasts. The last was the reason for Serena’s visit.

Historic crime fiction. “A whole new market!” her agent had exclaimed. _A whole new world of pain_ , Serena had thought, knowing all the extra research that would be necessary. She was enjoying it, though: quiet afternoons at the back of the library, scratching notes into a pristine new pad while the dust twirled in shafts of sunlight from over her shoulder, the smell of yellowing pages all around her. She had borrowed the key texts, the ones upon which she relied for a realistic sketch of London at the end of the 19th century, but she liked working here in any case, with extra books on hand and a warm cup of tea whenever Pam was on duty. If anyone but the librarian she had known since their school days recognised Serena here, they didn’t make a show of it.

She sighed a loud contented sigh just to think of it, running her fingertips along laminated spines as she made her way through biography to the corner she had made her own in recent weeks.

The sight of someone else sat hunched on an elephant’s foot made her jump. When that someone else looked up in fright and turned out to be Berenice Wolfe, Serena’s gasp became a groan before she could stop it.

“Ah, oh, Berenice,” she said, recovering as quickly as she could. What did one say in moments such as this? _Fancy seeing you here_? _Of all the sections in all the library…_ “Sorry, you, er, you made me jump. I’m not used to running into anyone else back here.” Serena smiled and cast her eyes around them, before looking back at Berenice.

Bernie still looked like a startled hare. “Sorry, I…” she trailed off, looking blankly at the books ranged on either side of her. For a moment she scrunched her brow, as if trying to decipher titles written in another language, and then looked back at her lap.

“No, no need to apologise, it is a public library after all.” Serena smiled again, feeling a little awkward – it _was_ a public library, but, well, this was _her_ bit of it – and smoothed the hair at the back of her neck.

From Bernie, no response.

Serena moved her bag from one shoulder to the other; tempted as she was just to squeeze past and carry on to her table, she could see Berenice’s jaw working furiously, her chin twitching, and she was intrigued. Not for the first time, she stood in front of Berenice and felt something, some tension, some unspeakable thing; their quarrel unhad thrummed in the air about them, Serena thought. This was not silence, but rather the hush of a conversation unvoiced.

Over the years it had usually been Berenice who broke first: pleasantries and platitudes, just enough to be polite, before excusing herself. Sometimes Serena needn’t speak at all, but this was not one of those times.

“Are you working on something?” she asked, her voice artificially light, even to her own ears. “Next one’s not due for a while, is it?” Serena grimaced – she had been shooting for a bit more sincerity, but damn it, here was evidence that she was familiar enough with Berenice’s work to know when she typically published. Serena had never publically talked Berenice’s books down, had made sure to give the appearance of appreciating a fellow author – another woman from the same town, no less – but this was as close to a compliment as she had ever got in direct conversation with Berenice herself. Serena’s cheeks grew hot for a moment at being caught out. Still, though, Bernie didn’t answer, or even look up.

Eventually Serena’s patience snapped. “Right, well, if I want to have a conversation with the top of someone’s head, I have a daughter not far away who’s more than happy to oblige, so if you’ll excuse me…”

She stopped when a mobile phone appeared in front of her, held in fingers with nails gnawed to the quick. Bernie had had the phone cradled on her knees and her gaze remained there even as she lifted the phone up to Serena.

Serena squinted at the screen but it was no good, she didn’t have her glasses on; she took the phone from Berenice’s grasp and lowered it to bring the words in to focus. She read aloud:

COP A FEEL: LOCAL AUTHOR’S LESBIAN ROMPS WITH WOMAN PC!

Bernie let out a small sob before clamping her hands over her mouth, and Serena found herself instinctively reaching out to rub Berenice’s back as she read on.

_Holby crime writer Berenice Wolfe – who quit the force after being shot 12 years ago – dated younger female officer behind husband’s back…_

Serena stopped and locked the phone, dropping it into Berenice’s bag. “Good god.”

“I know,” Bernie whispered, her voice wet with tears. “I know, OK? I” –

Serena interrupted before she could say anymore: “Those bastards!”

Bernie blinked up at her, rubbing mascara across her cheeks as she tried to clear her vision. “What?”

Serena crouched down so that their faces were level. “Those utter bastards – who do they think they are? And who do they think you are?” – at this Bernie frowned, and Serena tipped her head; “no offence, but not exactly ‘JK Rowling caught robbing old ladies’, is it?”

Bernie laughed, very briefly, despite herself, and Serena squeezed her knee, her body naturally looking to give comfort before her mind could think better of it. The two things she disliked most about her home town, the local paper and Berenice Wolfe, and now she was pitched with one against the other. 

“What am I going to do?” Bernie’s voice was still soft and faltering. All those times Serena had thought she’d seen fear in Berenice’s eyes, all those times she had been convinced that just the sight of her was enough to make Berenice quake with guilt and shame! They were nothing compared to what she saw now: Bernie looked wretched, there was no better, no kinder word for it, Serena knew. Bernie’s teeth worried her bottom lip, chapped white for the attention. Bernie’s eyes couldn’t settle for more than a second on one thing or another, but when they landed dark on Serena even that moment was long enough to carry the anguish, the bewilderment. “I can’t…” Bernie’s face crumpled, pushing fresh tears down her cheeks. “I can’t go home.” The final word rushed out of her on another sob, and Serena found herself looking over her shoulders to make sure she was still the only one listening. Her thumb worked soothingly back and forth across Berenice’s knee cap as she pondered the dilemma.

“You’re going to come back to mine,” Serena said, getting back to her feet and picking up Berenice’s bag, sliding the strap onto her shoulder alongside her own. Bernie looked up, still bleary eyed and now incredulous. “Yeah,” Serena said, responding to a question that had never actually come. “It’s the last place anyone will look for you.” She crooked her arm for Berenice to take and nodded towards the side exit, which would take them directly into the car park. “Come on.”

 

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Sorry again for another delay. I shall count myself lucky if you're still reading!


	6. All my secrets

Bernie hunched over her knees and clasped the mug of tea in both hands, looking out at the back garden with scrunched-up eyes. She looked as though she was concentrating - as though she might at any moment pronounce something to be afoot in the mature borders, but really her mind was all noise, like a radio picking up several stations at once, and her vision was merely incidental. Her eyes didn’t track the movement of the birds at the table or the sway of the empty washing line in the breeze. She startled when Serena spoke.

“You don’t have to tell me anything,” Serena said; “I don’t expect any kind of explanation.” She paused, and Bernie closed her eyes. It was strange to be in Serena’s home, to be offered some escape by a woman she barely knew. Serena had said she would be safe here, but there was no _safe_ : everything was shot. There was only _hidden_.

“There’s more tea in the pot, if you want it,” Serena went on, making to leave. “I’ll just be…”

“I’ve never spoken to anyone about Alex.” Bernie’s voice was raspy, hushed, and long seconds passed before she looked up to where her words had pinned Serena in place.

“Would… would you like to?” Serena put her mug down on the counter and cocked her head to one side. “Would it help, do you think?”

Bernie shivered slightly, her right knee bouncing up and down, the very idea of sharing this secret unleashing a wave of adrenaline. Serena pulled out another of the kitchen chairs and set it in front of Bernie, before sitting down and placing both hands on the dancing knee to still it.

Bernie blinked up at her. “It, it wasn’t… some sordid…” 

“No, no,” Serena said, shaking her head. “I’m sure it wasn’t.”

“I don’t want you to think…”

“I’m not thinking anything.”

Serena’s eyes were warm, quite unlike Bernie had ever known them before, at least when they had been on her. It should have scared her, the wretched truths of her life out in the open like this, but for the first time in a long while, Bernie realised, she felt seen, and through kind, hazel-brown eyes.

“I didn’t actually work with Alex for that long – probably not even a year before I got… before I left the force. It was after that, once I’d started writing.”

It didn’t come out the way Bernie had always thought it would, their story. She had only ever imagined telling it to Marcus, and then it was a story of how sorry she was, how she hadn’t wanted to hurt him, hadn’t wanted to turn their life upside down. For Marcus she had a noble explanation for the visits to Bath: she hadn’t wanted to invite Alex into the bed she shared with him. For Serena a rounder truth: the short drive bought them time together in their own happy little bubble. She had loved falling asleep in Alex’s arms and waking up in them too; she had loved being able to look at her without inhibition or shame. She had loved how readily Alex had understood her, how she hadn’t flinched to hear her voice her darkest doubts. In short she had loved Alex, and been loved steadfastly in return.

“But I’m a terrible coward.” Bernie stopped and pushed the tears from her cheeks and sniffed, barely registering the squeeze of her knee from Serena. “We had a close call, Marcus’s mother fell ill while we were together… oh, it was such a mess, I got scared, I…”

Bernie licked her lips. If she was honest, in her eyes, her worst offence was not betraying her husband but ending things with Alex when the death of her mother-in-law pushed her to choose between the two. The thought of saying the words aloud, here, in Serena Campbell’s kitchen, made her heart thump in her chest.

“You don’t have to tell me anything you don’t want to, remember?” Serena bobbed her head to catch Bernie’s eye. Bernie felt as though at any moment Serena might open her arms and gather her up into a hug, and she berated herself for thinking that she would gladly lose herself in the embrace, would happily stop speaking and close her eyes and feel nothing but the brush of cashmere against her cheek. She cleared her throat and took a sip of the now cold tea to try and soothe the burn.

“Why did you say this was the last place anyone would look for me?”

Serena smiled. “Well, hardly bosom buddies, are we?” She took Bernie’s mug and tipped away the dregs, refilling the kettle.

“Yes,” Bernie said quietly, “why is that?”

Serena stopped at the fridge and turned around, looking quizzically at Bernie. “You really don’t know?”

Bernie shook her head – she could tell from the look on Serena’s face that she should know, that in fact Serena thought she did know, but she had no idea. They just weren’t friends. Bernie realised, with a pang of guilt, that she’d never been terribly curious about it until now.

Offering Bernie a fresh mug, Serena sat down and looked at her, a searching gaze that ordinarily would have panicked Bernie a little, but everything was too raw now to discern such shades.

“You gave an interview on the local radio station, around the time that _A Waiting Game_ came out,” Serena began, self-consciously dabbing at a spot of coffee on the table; “it sounds silly now, but…the story, of mine, they mentioned it and…”

Bernie gasped in recognition.

“It’s all a long time ago and I don’t want to rake it up, but there we are,” Serena said, just the right side of babbling, “that’s why I’ve always been a bit frosty with you. It wasn’t so much the plagiarism, really, but the brush-off and-” She was cut off by another gasp from Bernie.

“Plagiarism? No, no, Serena, you’ve got this all wrong.” They looked at each other again, a long pause as Bernie tried to work out whether she should continue or let Serena speak.

Serena folded her arms, seeming to give Bernie the floor, but then said: “Have I indeed?” Her brow was now set at an imperious angle. “I know the interviewer was easily fobbed off, Berenice, but you panicked when she asked about it. You were shaking so much I thought the Roberts Revival might topple off the table.”

A dark chuckle. “You know all my secrets now, Serena; please, call me Bernie.

“Well, all my secrets but one.” Bernie pressed her palms into the table and took in a gulp of air, as though she was about to duck underwater.

“I panicked because, um, because I’d never read a word you had written. Marcus bought me a whole load of crime novels when I started with the books, but I hadn’t got around to reading them. I wasn’t…” Bernie broke off, unable to keep from smiling, and glad to see something like humour in Serena’s eyes, too. Still she looked down, guiltily studying the floor tile at her feet as she finished her sentence. “I wasn’t much in to the genre, to be honest.”

At the sound of Serena’s laughter Bernie looked up again and grinned. For the first time since answering her mobile earlier that day, she wasn’t thinking about her marriage, or her family, or love lost. “I almost choked on my relief when they said it was a story from ages ago; seemed okay not to have read it.”

Serena feigned outrage in response.

“I felt like such a charlatan, though, Serena. My big break and I almost mess it up before I’ve even left the confines of Holby.”  

“I trust you’ve been keeping up since?” Serena asked through a devilish grin.

Bernie threw a salute. “I read your last book twice and the next is on pre-order, Ms Campbell.”

“Glad to hear it.”

“Have you, er, do you…” Bernie blushed, unable to finish the question.

“I am fully au fait with DCI Granger’s exploits, Bere-- Bernie,” Serena said, once again reaching out to offer a reassuring touch. “Although I’ll perhaps think of Sergeant Maconie a little differently now.”

The red on Bernie’s cheeks deepened. “Sorry,” Serena said, though her eyes were alight with friendly mirth. “Too soon?”

To her own surprise, Bernie didn’t mind the joke, but before she could respond, her pocket buzzed loudly, two short bursts. A text message. She pulled her phone out and looked at the screen for a long time before speaking.

“Marcus. There’s a suitcase on the driveway, apparently, which I’d better collect before the man from the _Gazette_ stops taking photos of it and starts rummaging around. And he’s told the kids to block my number.”

Bernie leaned forwards, taking deep breaths; she felt sick again, reminded that this was a situation over which she had no control, in which she must always react, and with an audience, too. And she should have been thinking about all of this, about her next move, and the next, about how to _survive_ this, but all she could think was how much easier it would have been just to tell Marcus, even at his mother’s deathbed; to have borne his sadness and disappointment, to have taken his slings and arrows, with Alex still at her side.

Bernie looked at Serena, her unlikely companion instead, and wished again that she could be folded into Serena’s arms and shielded from the world. _Coward_.

Serena did reach out, to take Bernie’s phone and read the message for herself. She tutted loudly. “What an arse,” she said.


	7. Woman helps friend collect suitcase

“Just here is fine.”

Serena pulled over and peered through the windscreen at the houses on either side of them. They were largely hidden from view by stone walls and hedges and trees that drooped over paths like cartoon witches, but still, none of them looked right. She did another sweep, and then turned to Bernie, hunched next to her.

“I thought you lived much further up, closer to the school?”

If it was possible – and Serena was pretty sure it wasn’t – Bernie shrank still further into the passenger seat. “You don’t want to get caught up in all of this, Serena,” she murmured, pressing her hands into the tops of her thighs.

Serena cocked her head. “What?”

“There’s a reporter there, or a photographer, at any rate; Marcus might be waiting for me. It’s probably going to be… unpleasant.”

“Yes, I imagine it will be,” Serena said, instinctively nodding her head as she did. “Which is precisely why I’m not going to let you go it alone.”

“It’s fine, Serena, I can handle it.” Bernie pushed her shoulders back as she said it, and Serena caught a glimpse of the former police officer in her new friend.

“Big macho ex-copper, are we?” Serena grinned at the surprised expression on Bernie’s face as she said it.

“Hardly,” Bernie replied. “But think about what’s happened here, Serena. You don’t want anyone making… assumptions… about you. _I_ don’t want anyone making assumptions about you. It wouldn’t be fair.”

Serena scoffed, and again Bernie looked surprised, and Serena softened. There was something almost childlike in the way that Bernie was looking at her, eyes full of hurt at Serena’s refusal just to go along with the plan. Serena said her name, quietly – she was quickly getting used to “Bernie” – and sighed.

“Are you going to shun the company of women forevermore, just in case someone thinks you’re dating?”

“No, but-”

“Do you not think it might look the teeny tiniest bit _more_ suspicious if whichever hack is there making no good use of his time were to follow you and find you sneaking a suitcase into the back of my car while I try and hide in the foot well?”

This time it was Bernie who snorted, apparently tickled by the image of Serena trying to dodge a long lens behind the steering wheel of a Volvo estate. Serena was relieved to see that Bernie could still laugh, even in the midst of all this mess - even though it only lasted a moment before Bernie frowned again and said: “He wouldn’t follow me all the way back down here, would he?”

“Well according to Marcus, he might be rifling through your undies as we speak; I wouldn’t rule it out.” Serena watched as Bernie rubbed her hands over her face, like she was trying to wake herself up from a nightmare.

Reaching out to squeeze Bernie’s shoulder, Serena went on: “Let me drive you up there? I’m not worried about what some snotty little reporter from the _Holby_ bloody _Gazette_ thinks.”

*

 

When they drew up to Bernie’s house they found the case sat on the driveway, just as Marcus had said it would be, but there was no sign of anything or anyone else. Still, Serena thought, it would do no harm to leave the car running, just in case. She remembered how she had felt when Edward’s affair came to light (the first one, anyhow) and she didn’t know Bernie’s husband well enough to know how he would handle the sight of Bernie trudging across the gravel to retrieve her things. Edward’s blithe demeanour as he’d packed a weekend bag that first time had infuriated Serena; tearful and half-cut, she had screamed at him, thrown weak punches at his back, his shoulders, the back of his head, and he had made her madder still by simply ducking and dodging, laughing at her as he pulled the door closed behind him. Serena knew that Bernie’s neutral expression was the product of willpower, of a long schooling in the virtues of a stiff upper lip, of a collision of shame and pride under the watchful eyes of her neighbours, but perhaps it would look different to her husband.

Bernie stopped when she got to the case, looking carefully at it before looking up at the house. Serena watched her crouch down; for a brief moment she seemed to look back towards the car, though her head didn’t move. When she saw Bernie scratch the back of her head, fingers delving into messy blonde hair, Serena turned the key in the ignition and made her way over. They might not have been friends all these years, but Serena had seen that tic often enough to know that Bernie was thinking, puzzling.

“Everything alright?” she said, walking up behind her.

“He’s given me one of my father’s old cases,” Bernie answered, slowly standing up and rubbing her back. At Serena’s bemused expression she went on: “No wheels.”

Serena looked from Bernie to the case, from the case to Bernie. She looked at the house, half expecting to see Marcus watching them, but the windows were all blank. “What an arse,” she said again, though she couldn’t say with any certainty that she wouldn’t have done the same thing to Edward, given the chance. She picked up the suitcase and leaned heavily to one-side to manage the weight, then started to make her way slowly back to the car.

Behind her, Bernie’s voice was hushed. “I’m so sorry, Serena.”

Between them they got the case into the boot, each of them wondering what the hell Marcus had put in there but neither suggesting they risk looking, not here. As Serena slammed the boot shut, a man appeared at her elbow.

“Serena Campbell, well,” he said, looking her up and down. Serena turned and did the same but said nothing.

“You…” he went on, dragging the word out, evidently enjoying the moment, “you a… _friend_ of Berenice Wolfe’s then? Didn’t realise you were so close…”

Serena’s icy stares were well known at the offices of the _Gazette_ ; if you hadn’t been the recipient of one, it simply meant she didn’t yet know you worked there. Still, the man wilted a little in the full beam of it.

“Colin, what a pleasure. Still the beating heart of journalism in the southwest, I see.” If anyone were to write a crime novel featuring Serena Campbell, looks could kill but exquisite elocution would be her weapon of choice. “Breaking news: woman helps friend collect suitcase.” She paused to allow the man a moment of silence to drown in. “Come on, Bernie.”

The reporter recovered a little as Bernie dropped into the passenger seat. “So you are friends, then?” he asked Serena across the roof of the car, then hurried around to the driver’s side as she disappeared out of sight. “You’re taking Ms Wolfe in? She’s staying at your house?”

They looked at one another through the half-open window. Colin pushed his glasses up on the bridge of his nose. Serena arched an eyebrow; when she spoke, her voice was deliciously deadpan: “Quick, somebody call the Pulitzer committee.”

*

 

There was plenty of room in the house. Elinor’s and Jason’s bedrooms sat ready for their returns – Elinor was at university and usually only visited when the ATM stopped putting out; Jason was away on a college activities trip and would be home in a few days – but the bedroom that had been Adrienne’s, briefly, was always made up.

“You don’t mind it being downstairs, do you?” Serena asked, as she hefted Bernie’s suitcase onto the bed. When there was no answer, she turned around to see Bernie staring absently at the carpet, and again she found herself reaching out, offering a gentle touch.

“Hmm?” Bernie started. “Oh, no, downstairs is fine.” Her gaze dropped away from Serena again before suddenly reversing its course. “Thank you,” she said, hurriedly. She looked at the suitcase; her hands fidgeted at her waist, but she didn’t seem keen to open the case, to look at what bits of her life her husband had passed on.

Serena bumped their shoulders together, lightly. “Cup o’ tea?”

*

 

It had long since gone dark by the time they stopped talking. They had covered everything, just about, Serena thought. Bernie’s career, her current pickle (as Serena put it, winning a wry smile), the plot of her next book; Serena’s childhood, her trials with Edward, with Elinor, what she called her ‘am dram years’. A museum of each other. Answering the loud rumbling of Bernie’s stomach, Serena had made them beans on toast, a horrible match for the red wine but comforting nonetheless.

At Bernie’s third yawn, Serena had packed her off to bed, shushing Bernie’s offers to do the washing up. Serena never let guests lift a finger, and besides, she rather liked to finish the day pottering in her kitchen; it was the room she loved most in the house. She took her time with the few dishes there were, retracing what had turned out to be an extraordinary day. She would never have believed, had you told her over breakfast, that Berenice Wolfe would end up as her house guest, far less in circumstances such as these. She could never have believed that she would so quickly, so easily, sympathise, offer herself to the aid of this woman, and yet she had, readily. Serena thought again about the tussle that seemed always to be going on inside Bernie, on the one hand so forthright and straightforward and accomplished, and on the other so scared and fragile and… well, if Serena didn’t know better, she would think that Bernie had looked at her, once or twice today, as if wishing that Serena would take charge of the situation, tell her what to do, make it all better. It had been, in those moments, like looking at Elinor when she was still tiny, stood at the edge of the bed asking her to make the bad dream go away.

She sighed and wiped her hands, flicking off the lights. Without meaning to, Serena found herself outside the spare room; she ducked her head to listen, and quickly realised that Bernie was crying.

She knocked softly.

There was no response, but she could hear Bernie sniffling, trying to stop crying. She knocked again, a bit more firmly, and opened the door.

“Bernie…”

“I’m fine, Serena.” Bernie was on her side, facing the opposite wall, and she didn’t turn around. “I haven’t got anything I didn’t deserve, today. Except for your kindness.” Serena tutted, but Bernie continued. “I really am very sorry. I’ll find a hotel tomorrow, they’ll-” she paused as she felt Serena sit on the edge of the bed; “they’ll have no reason to drag you into this.”

“Much as I would-” now Serena broke off, leaning over to press on Bernie’s shoulder, to make sure they were looking at each other, as best they could in the dim light of the room. “Much as I would _hate_ to hit the headlines for being the sort of person who would lend a hand,” she said, enjoying Bernie’s eye-roll in return, “I don’t think you should go to a hotel.” Bernie tried to protest. “Ah ah ah, no, I won’t hear it. If nothing else happens in Holby this week to keep those idiots busy they’ll have you penned into your room, living on trays of chips. At least if you’re here, you’ll have a bit of space. And with any luck, before long someone’ll do something daft enough to distract them. Then you can go wherever you want to. Timbuktu, if you feel like it.”

Bernie smiled: a grateful, weary smile. Serena raised her finger in the air between them; “I’ll be right back,” she said. Heading upstairs, she put pyjamas on and brushed her teeth, being as quick as she could without hurrying. When she came back downstairs, Bernie was lying on her back, her arm bent underneath her head; she looked at Serena with surprise.

“Don’t even try and tell me you want me to go upstairs,” Serena said quickly, stopping Bernie in her tracks. “Come on, shift up. No funny business, OK?”

“No, god, Serena, I…”

“It was a joke, Bernie.” Serena lifted her arm to allow Bernie to scooch in and rest her head on Serena’s shoulder; Bernie looked disbelievingly at her for a moment and then did just that. “Nothing worse than being on your own in a strange bed when everything’s gone to hell,” Serena whispered in to Bernie’s hair.


	8. A glass of something

Bernie leaned back on the door to close it and then went to put the post on the table, sorting it by recipient as she went. A bank statement for Elinor; something from Norway for Jason – a World’s Strongest Man contestant, no doubt; he’d kept up a solid campaign of letter-writing; several bills for Serena.

“Still no sign of the wine thingy,” she said, going into the kitchen. She and Serena had made the mistake of looking at eBay while tipsy and Serena had ordered an expensive carafe and glasses set, but that was weeks ago now.

“Oh god,” Serena said, shaking her head. “I knew there was a reason I never mix booze and the internet.” She shuffled the papers on the table in front of her. “Pass me the scissors, would you?”

Bernie plucked the scissors from the block and handed them over Serena’s shoulder. “I’m just popping to the shops; do you want anything? Do we need milk?”

“Milkman’s been this morning,” Serena mumbled, still concentrating on the pages she was attempting to edit the old-fashioned way.

“OK. Message me if you think of anything." 

It was sunny and warm, so Bernie took the long way around. She walked slowly, kicking stray stones and running her fingers through the leaves that reached out to her across garden fences. She hummed a tune - at least, it sounded like a tune to her – and swung the tote bag out in front of her.

She had been at Serena’s for well over two months now, she realised. Yes, it would be three months next week. It was far longer than she had anticipated – although she wasn’t sure, come to think of it, that she had been in a position to make predictions. It was a fitting punishment, somehow, that everything should have been taken out of her hands. Bernie had sent Charlotte a birthday card and texted Cam before his exams, but they and Marcus had maintained a steady silence. Alex, it transpired, had recently joined the army, and was unlikely to be reading the _Gazette_ ; Bernie hoped it would never reach her, didn’t want it to hurt her, and was glad that Alex’s family was not local. She had been called to a meeting with her publisher, but they had only suggested pushing her schedule back six months in order to let things die down; Bernie had surprised herself by accepting their decision without question.

So the respite at Serena’s had endured and become a kind of comfortable domesticity, despite their differences. Serena worked to a timetable, preferring to structure her day, while Bernie wrote when it felt right, no matter the hour. She could write for 10 minutes or for hours at a time, the room going dark around her, occasionally slurping from a mug of peppermint tea. It was cold and stewed and made Bernie grimace, but in those moments world war three could start, Jason had said, and Bernie wouldn’t notice. The two of them had bonded straight off the bat, and when Bernie was struggling to write, they watched TV together, shouting out answers to quiz shows and arguing over who said it first. Or they walked to the library to pick up audiobooks, stopping by at the cemetery to visit Jason’s mother on the way home. They baked cakes at the weekend and Bernie had Jason’s fish and chips order down at the second attempt, a pickled egg persuading Jason to forgive the first. Serena tidied up after Bernie and Bernie ran errands, cooked curries that made everyone’s noses run, and occasionally tried to fix things before pronouncing them to be ‘cactus’. No one ever knew if she had made them better or worse.

The parade of shops was at Serena’s end of town, and after a few apprehensive visits, Bernie had deduced that neither the local paper nor her husband was lurking around every corner. Besides the exchange between their solicitors, Marcus was content to behave as if Bernie didn’t exist; some dodgy experimental treatment at the hospital had distracted the _Gazette_. Bernie picked up a few bits and pieces, and then stood in front of the shelves bearing red wine. At some point every evening, no matter if Bernie had still been typing feverishly at her laptop, she and Serena sat down together with a glass of something. Bernie had hated it when Marcus interrupted her while she was writing in the evenings: she had scolded him when he asked her to come and sit with him, to have a drink; had shouted and wept at how little he understood her. Sometimes Bernie had only to hear the cork leave the bottle with a ‘pop’, sometimes Serena would stand in the doorway and say, “Drink?”, but always, now, Bernie would click ‘Save’ and make her way to the lounge. She thought it had changed her, this whole experience - made her softer, made her value people more. It didn’t occur to her that it was the difference between Marcus and Serena.

She put two of the more expensive bottles of Shiraz into her basket.

*

 

It was still warm that night, and Bernie couldn’t sleep. She had pushed the covers down the bed, had stripped to her t-shirt, had opened the window, but still she couldn’t nod off. She huffed and sighed and tossed and turned, but for nought. After a while the door opened, and Serena slipped into the room with a glass of cold water, wordlessly handing it to Bernie. Bernie gulped it down and placed the glass on the bedside table, moving over to make space for Serena beside her.

Somehow Serena always knew. Bernie rarely cried herself to sleep any more, but sometimes she would get a letter from her solicitor and everything would feel raw again, and if on that same day she thought she saw her daughter across the street, or thought she heard her son’s voice in the next aisle at the supermarket, she would climb into bed and hug the pillow to her and shed a few tears, her body shaking silently - Jason’s was the room above hers and she didn’t want to wake him. But Bernie couldn’t think of a time that Serena hadn’t come to offer comfort.

“’nkyou,” Bernie said, voice muffled in Serena’s shoulder and already sounding sleepy. 

“Not too warm, am I?”

Bernie shook her head, reaching down to pull the kicked-off covers up to their middles. “Jus’ right.”


	9. Budleigh Salterton

“You have to admit,” Bernie said, lifting her sunglasses off of her nose and placing them on the top of her head, “it does sound a bit funny. Like it should be the setting for a Tuesday afternoon drama on ITV.”

Serena smiled – Bernie was right, annoyingly – but the village of Budleigh Salterton hosted what had swiftly become one of her favourite literary festivals, being at the end of a straightforward drive to Devon, with a view of the sea when you got there.

Bernie looked up the road. “Looks like the traffic’s stopping ahead.”  

Serena sighed. Bernie wasn’t the worst passenger in the world – Serena could still remember Edward’s mother sitting where Bernie was now, clutching at the dashboard, bracing herself for impact the moment Serena went above 25mph – but she wasn’t far off. They had bickered this morning, at the crack of dawn, about how to get there: Bernie favouring the motorway, Serena preferring the journey on smaller, prettier roads. She drew up to the back of the queue of traffic and looked across at Bernie, who was pretending to study the upholstery.

“Go on, say it,” Serena said.

“Hmm?” Bernie played dumb. “Me? What?”

“It’s my fault for choosing A-roads, we wouldn’t be stuck here if we’d taken the M5, we’ll probably get the worst rooms when we check-in, we might not even make the first session…”

Bernie took her sunglasses off her head and chewed the end of one of the arms, squinting as she looked over the line of cars ahead of them. “I wasn’t thinking any of that, Serena…”

“Liar!”

“But since you mention it…” They grinned at each other, giggling like schoolgirls.  

They had been sharing a house for five months now, not that anyone (except Jason) was counting. It felt like longer, like it had always been this way, and Serena couldn’t quite believe that Bernie was the same person she had hated for so long – or that she herself was the same woman who had cherished that grudge. She had quickly come to depend on Bernie for laughs, for a shoulder to cry on, for a sounding board, and provided the same in return. You would probably have to go back to her school days, Serena thought, to find a friend who had been so big a part of her daily life.

The traffic didn’t keep them from the start of the festival, though it was a close-run thing. They checked in quickly, dashing to drop their bags in rooms at opposite ends of a higgledy-piggledy bed-and-breakfast and rushing out again, helpers clipping name badges onto them as they went. Later on they would be at the same panel, focused on violence against women in fiction, but first Bernie was discussing representations of law enforcement and Serena was reading from her soon-to-be-published historical novel.

Serena had done this sort of thing hundreds of times before yet felt strangely at sea without Bernie nearby. She couldn’t help looking for her in the crowd, though she knew she wouldn’t find her; couldn’t help turning to watch a blonde head pass by the entrance to the tent just in case it should be Bernie. She tuned back in to the voice of author who was reading before her and tried to concentrate. Perhaps she and Bernie were spending too much time together, she mused. She couldn’t think which times she would give up without complaint, though.

Going into the lunch tent, she was collared by an excitable young author who was very sorry, who knew it wasn’t the done thing, but would she mind, could she just sign this? Serena scribbled in the front of the book and smiled in what she hoped were the right places while furtively scanning the room; Bernie was nowhere to be seen. Eventually the young man thanked her for the final time and backed away, almost bowing. Serena sighed and ran her fingers across her brow – there was a time that she would have lapped up the attention. “But apparently that time has passed,” she muttered to herself.

“First sign of madness.” Serena turned around to see Bernie smiling at her, two paper plates loaded with buffet items in her hands.

“You,” she said, taking one of them and biting into a small sausage roll - Bernie was gamely eating hers whole, “are a superstar.” Serena nodded towards the chap from before: “I seem to have a bit of a fan.”

“So I see,” Bernie said, her voice serious but her eyes teasing. “Should I have a word with security, or is he the next Mr Serena Campbell, do you think?”

“He’s about 12 years old!” Serena squeaked; “he’s got three hairs on his top lip and it’s taken him two years to grow them.”

“Savage,” Bernie whispered; "You sound almost like Ellie."

Serena laughed. She had expected her daughter to be exasperated by Bernie – Elinor hated anyone who tried too hard – but they had gradually found an understanding. As for the next Mr Serena Campbell, she couldn’t see it, somehow. She had stopped looking a couple of years ago, had deleted her online profiles and refused any attempts at matchmaking; more recently, she realised, the thought hadn’t even crossed her mind.

“Shall we get a coffee before our panel?” she asked Bernie. “There’s a van over there that’s supposed to be good.”

Bernie folded her plate into a bin and raised her eyebrow, smiling broadly. “The one that sells pastries?”

“Oh, does it? I can’t say I’d notic- yes alright, alright.” Bernie was laughing now, and Serena shooed her out of the tent. “Come on then, or we’ll be late.”

The panel was well attended; there were three other authors there and the chair fielded excellent, if at times challenging, questions. Neither Bernie nor Serena had written explicitly about sexual violence against women, though both had written novels that alluded to it. Serena was glad not to be tackling the topic alone; she had never lacked confidence, but she knew that on this, at least, she and Bernie agreed completely, and that made facing down the condescending male author at the other side of the stage easier. When at one point Serena rose out of her seat slightly, in anger, she felt Bernie’s hand briefly slide on top of hers where it gripped the arm of the chair.

“I should have ripped his wig off!” Serena fumed, afterwards.

“Did you think it was a- sorry, not the point,” Bernie said, steering Serena towards the pub function room hosting most of the attending authors for dinner that evening. “Probably best that you didn’t though, hmm?”

They took their seats and Bernie poured them each a glass of water while Serena looked over the wine menu.

“No Shiraz.”

“Malbec?" 

“Suppose so.”

It was their last private exchange of the meal. Soon the rest of their table arrived and immediately drew them into conversation, Serena on the subject of e-readers, Bernie on bee-keeping (campaigners had dropped ‘Save the bees’ leaflets on every table at the festival). Serena tried to knit the two conversations together, but no sooner had she steered the women beside her to bees than she realised that Bernie and the two men on the other side of the table were now discussing the lost tramways of Bristol. They could only steal glances, share apologetic shrugs. Before Serena knew it, it was 10.30pm, and the tables were being cleared around them.

They crossed the road back to the B&B and agreed to meet at 7am for breakfast.

“Night,” Bernie said, pausing, hesitating – did she? – before stooping slightly to pass beneath the stairs, towards the back of the building and her room.

“Night,” Serena replied, quietly. Her room was up the stairs and up another flight that narrowed as it reached the top. She climbed slowly and dropped the latch behind her. It had been a long day and Serena felt weary as she shrugged off her clothes and put on her pyjamas, yet she felt restless the second she laid on the bed. She got up again and stood at the window. In the foreground a few lights shone out of windows and then everything gave way to the dark, the sky and the sea a single inky mass. It didn’t help her to feel any less out of sorts.

She wished Bernie was next door, or on the floor below, but she was nowhere near. Serena had no reason to go to her – it wasn’t as if she could have been passing, could have heard that Bernie needed someone to comfort her. She thought again about how reluctantly Bernie had seemed to say goodnight, though; had she imagined that? Serena paced back and forth, eventually deciding that she would go, would steal through the building in her nightwear with an excuse ready if she found, on knocking, that she had woken Bernie. She checked herself in the mirror and decided to pull on a jumper, for modesty’s sake; she would have to pass reception, after all.

When she opened the door, Serena gasped and jolted backwards: on the other side of it was Bernie, fist half-raised, about to knock. As Serena heaved and pressed her chest, Bernie stepped into the room and closed the door.

“I’m so sorry!” she said, dropping the jumper she had been carrying onto the bed and taking Serena by the shoulders. “I didn’t mean to scare you. I just…” Bernie turned away, biting her lip. “I couldn’t sleep?” 

By now Serena had collected herself enough to chuckle and take Bernie’s hand. “Funny,” she said, “I was thinking the exact same thing.” She nodded towards Bernie’s habitual side of the bed and got in the other, though in any case they met in the middle.

They lay close, facing one another, Bernie tracing her fingertips up and down Serena’s arm as Serena played with strands of her hair.

“Why couldn’t you sleep?” Serena asked, tucking Bernie’s hair behind her ear. She suddenly found she couldn’t look Bernie in the eye and focused instead on the blonde curls wrapped around her finger.

“I don’t know, Serena.” Bernie’s voice was a whisper; at the sound of her name, Serena finally looked at her. “I missed you, I think.”

For a moment the room was still, and dark, and silent. And then Bernie kissed her.

It was hesitant at first, tentative; their lips were dry, and their hands froze where they were. Serena felt as though she was in a dream, as though this was something she was watching second-hand, somehow, until Bernie pulled back, her eyes wide with fear, and Serena’s heart swelled and bruised at the sight; she ran her fingers around to the back of Bernie’s head, pulled her closer, let herself be pulled closer as Bernie’s hand slipped around her waist.

Eventually Bernie pulled away again, only she smiled this time, a shy smile, and ran her thumb slowly back and forth across Serena’s hip. Serena’s own fingers toyed with Bernie’s t-shirt, at the dip of her waist. They looked at each other again, their breathing slowing. Serena waited for the blood to stop pounding in her ears, and it was almost back to normal when Bernie kissed her again, once, twice, three times. They surveyed each other in silence until Serena spoke.

“What is this, Bernie?”

Bernie ran her fingertips over Serena’s lips, her eyes tracking their movement, her breath warm on Serena’s cheek.

“I don’t… I’m not… I think…” Bernie gave up with words and looked at Serena again; despite the shadows cast by the moonlight, Serena felt as though she had looked directly into the sun. She blinked.

“Is it something you’d want?” Bernie asked, her voice trembling.

Serena didn’t know which raced faster, her brain or her pulse. Bernie had kissed her like she might die if she stopped yet touched her as if Serena might break beneath her hands; Serena felt overwhelmed, as though she was suffocating, and yet she wanted more, wanted Bernie to be everywhere she wasn’t. Everything was a contradiction. Half an hour ago Serena had had no idea of this, hadn’t so much as imagined it, and now she felt as though she was being given something that she had spent a lifetime chasing.

“Yes,” she whispered, pressing Bernie to her, pressing her lips to Bernie's cheek, to her neck, to her ear. "Yes."


End file.
